How do we digitize our media?

April 7, 2016 4:51 AM

Husbunny and I have a lot of CDs, DVDs and VHS Cassettes. I've been lobbying to get rid of it all, how best to do it?

I'm pretty big on reducing clutter, and I've corralled our media into attractive boxes, but there are SO MANY boxes full of stuff.

I took the DVDs out of their boxes and got them into sleeves and condensed them into one box. It felt fantastic.

The music I think should be ditized. Is there a fast way to do this? How does it get catalogued so that both Husbunny and I can access it easily?

Any ideas or suggestions welcome!

posted by Ruthless Bunny to Technology (15 answers total)

I am not sure what you mean by 'fast.' This will take a moderate time commitment even if you have the right gear :-) For music, I used iTunes to rip the CDs and I set up the preferences so that it stored the library in my Dropbox folder. I can access all the media using any device which is logged into my Dropbox account (e.g. iPads, secondary computers).
posted by JoannaC at 5:09 AM on April 7, 2016

Depending on your free time/ income ratio, you may find it makes the most sense to get rid of everything and re-download the stuff you actually find yourself wanting to watch. You can purchase it legally or download illegally, which many people feel is ethical if they already own the media in another format.

My friends who have ripped large CD collections have generally either paid tweens (their kids or friends’ kids) to do it for them, or done it while doing other tedious stuff at work (loading and unloading CDs while on conference calls, etc.).

If you have VHS you really want to convert (like home movies maybe?) and don’t want to set up your own system for it, there are services that will do it for you, and some libraries (like mine!) have converters.
posted by metasarah at 5:16 AM on April 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

as others are saying, i just sat down and ripped things. it took forever, but spread over a month or two it turns out i spend a fair amount of time surfing the web....

the ripping programs can be configured to place the music in a directory structure of your choosing. i use "artist name" directories that have "album name" subdirectories, and then tracks in there. they will also often set the mp3 tags (metadata) with the album information. if you want to share that amongst multiple people you can put it on some kind of server as a shared disk.

music playing software can then read those directories and use the metadata tags to present things as you want.

(i can go into details of the software i used, but it's linux, so likely not useful).
posted by andrewcooke at 5:44 AM on April 7, 2016

I'd spend $5 on a VPN and then download as much of your collection as you can from torrent servers. Yes, technically a copyright issue, but really if you spend 5 minutes ripping the CD or 40 seconds downloading it the end result is exactly the same, you have one digital copy of a CD that you own. Odds of anything bad happening to you are vanishingly small, although not quite zero.
posted by COD at 5:48 AM on April 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

For ripping audio, if you care about quality, you should rip to both a lossless format (such as FLAC) for long term archival and lossy (such as mp3 or AAC). There's lots of ripping software out there but it's been so long since I've use one that I can't recommend anything current. You may find it simpler to just get a streaming music service (such as Google Play, Apple Music, Spotify Premium) that lets you play arbitrary songs on demand and get rid of all the CDs that you don't have sentimental attachment to as a physical object or that are so obscure that they're not on those services.

Handbrake is pretty standard for DVDs.

VHS? I'd do some thinking on how likely you are to ever watch them again and whether they're on Netflix etc. They're going to look pretty awful with today's technology. If you really want to keep them, you need some kind of analog audio/video interface that will let you record them to your computer. VHS is going to be interlaced, which you don't need to care about other than knowing that you need to turn on the deinterlacing option in the capture software.

I'll note to be legal/ethical, you are supposed to throw away the physical objects after you rip them and not sell or give them to someone else. If you're not going to bother with legality, you might as well just download everything rather than ripping them.
posted by Candleman at 5:56 AM on April 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I haven't bought a new physical CD since 2006 (David Gilmour's On an Island). I have purchased digital downloads from that point until 2011, when Spotify became available. I bought the Premium subscription which was ad-free and allowed mobile streaming. I switched to Apple Music when it started, and have been very happy with it.

I got rid of most my closet full of DVDs once it seemed like most everything was available to rent via streaming services. I kept a handful of DVDs, mostly the ones that are not available for streaming, which includes a lot of concert DVDs. (I don't know why so many concerts are not available for streaming, but it seems to be the way it is.) I do plan to rip these DVDs to a hard drive so I can stream them to my TV via Plex or Xbox 360. But I'm not that ambitious yet. Otherwise, I rent or buy movies via streaming services, usually iTunes.

For VHS, I bought a VHS-to-DVD unit years ago and converted a few things, but quickly realized it was a waste of time for anything commercially available, unless it's rare or unavailable. I do have a box full of old home movies on VHS. I frankly don't feel the need to ever watch them again, but I can't just toss them out. So, I put the VHS-to-DVD converter in the box with the old tapes, labeled it "home movies and required equipment" and stored it in the basement. So if the urge ever strikes me (or my kid after she inherits them!) to watch or convert them, there they are. I understand the tapes are slowly degrading as they sit, but whatever.

I have friends who love their collections of physical media, and I get it. I like handing and looking at the physical media too. But I love not having it clutter my house even more, and my lazy side loves being able to stream a movie without having to walk all the way across the room and putting a disk in a thing. So exhausting. How did I ever manage that?
posted by The Deej at 6:17 AM on April 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

We digitized all our audio and store it on a home media server (well, right now it's a Windows 10 desktop that just hangs out by itself in the basement but it streams to all the devices on our home network which is all we need it to do). It takes a long time to rip CDs when you've got hundreds of them, and I'm not sure torrenting is that much of a time-saver since you still have to search for what you need. At least with ripping, you set it up so that as soon as you put an audio CD in, it starts the rip and stashes the files straight into whatever library you want to keep them in, so you can brainlessly sit there shoving CDs into the drive while watching TV.

After ripping, we got rid of all the jewel cases and store the physical CDs in those big books. It saves a tremendous amount of space.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:34 AM on April 7, 2016

Also, at the point you go all digital, backups become more important. Drives fail, fires happen, and media files are large enough that backing them up online can be a pain depending on the size of the collection. Make sure there's at least one full copy of the collection on an external hard drive at a friend's house etc.

(And take the opportunity to make sure that all the non-media stuff that's important is backed up off site too.)
posted by Candleman at 6:43 AM on April 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Check out this service called Murfie. You send them all of your CDs. They digitize them and put them in storage. You can stream them online or download them. You can also sell them to other Murfie customers, but not if you've downloaded them. If you ever decide you want them back, they'll send them to you (without the jewel cases)

It's not cheap (~$1 per CD, which can add up really quickly), but it's a great service.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:52 AM on April 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

I used Musicshifter as a test case (only sent them 10 CDs) almost ten years ago, and in the time it took to send them, and have them sent back, I found a bash script online that pretty much automated the process save for the putting-in-new-discs part, and so didn't use them again. Also, the script queried an online database, and put the data in an SQL db, which Musicshifter most definitely did not do.
posted by eclectist at 9:41 AM on April 7, 2016

I use iTunes for my music collection. On my 2007 Mac it will rip a 60 minute CD in just a few minutes. If the CD is known on the internet, all the album information will automatically be attached to the CD before you import it (this information is editable both before and after ripping), and if you have the iTunes settings right, all your music will be in folders arranged Artist -> Album for easy locating by any player you choose if the drive is available on your network.

I do have a DVD Recorder and a VHS player and have done some VHS to Digital transformation by spooling a VHS onto a DVD and then ripping the DVD on my computer using various software. This is very very time consuming, and the results are, well, VHS quality video, but sometimes that's all you can get for some things.

I have also done quite a bit of cassette transferring over the years. This is most time consuming of all. Spooling the tape into my computer (using Audacity to record, having to futz with input levels, sometimes having to start an entire side over because of bad levels, etc), chopping apart the tracks, converting from WAV to MP3, inputting all the track information... But the results are, I have a lot of material digitally transferred that simply cannot be found online anywhere. Satisfying, but very labor intensive.

I'd recommend against abandoning personal copies of movies and music for streaming services. A lot of stuff offered on Netflix cycles in and out of availability, so if you used to have that DVD but you got rid of it because it was online, you might find that 3 months later that movie is no longer available on-demand like you might want.

Options for this would be buying digital files and whatnot.

I do pretty much NOT recommend ripping commercial DVDs into digital video. While I do use commercial DVD ripping for some projects, the DRM on them and the video conversion to get them into a useable format is very processor- and time-intensive. Buy a digital copy from your favorite retailer if you want these movies. Otherwise, enjoy your physical media.
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM on April 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone:

We're looking into Murfie for the music. The DVDs, I'm not going to transfer. They're all in a shoebox and there they'll stay.

I LOVE the point that the VHS tapes will have a crappy resolution. YAY! Honestly, between Chromecast, all the premium channels, On Demand and Netflix, we haven't bought a DVD in 6 years!
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:20 PM on April 7, 2016

For DVDs, I'd recommend getting a DVD/CD notebook/wallet (something along these lines) if you want to store them in a more easily browseable form.

If you ever do want to rip the DVDs yourself, I'd recommend using MakeMKV to do the ripping and then use something like Handbrake to get the file down to a more reasonable size after you've ripped them. AFAIK, Handbrake doesn't strip the copy protection from DVDs, so you'd likely be using a separate ripping program anyway. As noted above, this can take some time, especially if you do it on an older machine (DVD ripping takes about 5-10 minutes and re-encoding around 10-20 on my top-of-the-line computer purchased 2 months ago; you're not likely to do better than that). I rip a fair number of my DVDs so that I can have my collection with me on the road in a portable hard drive, since my laptop doesn't have an optical drive, so it can be useful to do ripping outside of just the desire to declutter.

I'd say that buying digital copies of movies from retailers tends to be hit or miss if you aren't fully invested in whatever ecosystem they design the digital copies for (e.g. there may be some devices that can watch them, but some that might not be able to), so YMMV as far as whether that's a viable alternative for you versus doing the ripping yourself.
posted by Aleyn at 1:03 PM on April 7, 2016

VHS will not only be bad resolution, but if the tapes are old and/or not stored well, they may have degraded significantly. A few years ago I transferred some old VHS tapes and a number of them were unplayable. I definitely wouldn't bother with anything on VHS except irreplaceable home movies (and be prepared to find that you need high end equipment to get it to play back acceptably).
posted by primethyme at 4:20 PM on April 7, 2016

Just a note on sleeve technology/wallets for optical media--those things scratch CDs/DVDs. It's fine if you only whip out your Princess Bride DVD once a year or so, but anything you watch frequently will be damaged. I strongly recommend using those extra slim clamshell cases for any optical media you a: care about b: can't easily replace c: watch frequently. Secondarily, those wallets are impractical as hell if the collection you are managing isn't fixed and complete. If you are even slightly tempted to maintain something like alphabetical/genre/studio/series order, the system inevitably breaks down and requires regular re-sorts. This is even true of systems that have "loose leaf" sleeves if more than one disc can occupy each sleeve. It sounds like you're already using boxes and not wallets, but I've seen these wallet recommendations several times over the last few months on AskMe and I wanted to add my two cents for future searchers.

So, the tl;dr: Wallets suck for incomplete/malleable collections, sleeves scratch optical media, bins/boxes with dividers and thin clamshell cases are better and require less maintenance.

And yes, you should throw away all of your VHS tapes.
posted by xyzzy at 5:07 PM on April 7, 2016